Taking the Loyalty Oaf Prizzi's Honor

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

It happens exactly the way the song says it should. Some enchanted evening Charley Partanna sees a stranger across a crowded room and somehow he knows, he knows even then, that he must see her again and again. As in any good romance, that turns out to be more easily wished than done. Charley, played by Jack Nicholson in one of his boldest performances, is a faithful lieutenant in one of New York's best and oldest Mafia families, the Prizzis. Irene Walker, the handsome woman in the designer suit whom he loves at first double take, is played by that estimable chameleon, Kathleen Turner, as a sort of yuppie princess. Resident of far-off Los Angeles, where she claims to be a tax consultant, she is knowledgeable about restaurants, cars and foreign languages. It is just possible to believe there may be a soft spot in this upwardly mobile heart for a brief enlivening encounter with someone like Charley -- crude but sweet, with an aura of danger about him.

She underestimates her man. Charley's salient virtue is loyalty, and once committed to her, he will stop at nothing short of marriage. Nor does she understand that he is not as dumb as Nicholson funnily, bravely makes him look. Charley's shrewdness is on a slow-burning fuse, but it is very much a part of his tenacious nature. He is bound to discover that the career in which Irene is making the greatest strides is not her visible one, but her hidden one: hit person for the Mob, with a sideline that includes cheating the Prizzis out of an unforgivably large sum of money. This is a very dangerous kind of moonlighting and one that will eventually place honest Charley in a conflict between his oldest loyalties and his newest one. That, in turn, places Irene in the way of an extremely nasty surprise. And the audience in the way of a very pleasant one.

For, finally, this wickedly complex movie is not to be taken literally. It is not an inside look at organized crime any more than it is a study of the joys and dangers of sexual obsession. It is a parable of generational conflict in Director Huston's most sardonic (or Asphalt Jungle) vein. Its basic irony derives from the fact that the Prizzi hoods, colorfully impersonated by such welcome old pros as William Hickey, Robert Loggia and Lee Richardson, represent, despite their line of work, traditional values. They take the long, institutional view of their enterprise, understanding that its greatest asset is its reputation for squaring accounts with rigorous fairness. To preserve it, they are willing to sacrifice short-term advantage. Irene, in contrast, represents the M.B.A. mentality, feminist division. She wants each new balance sheet to improve on the last, and will cut dangerous corners to attain that end. And pioneering an occupation previously closed to her sex, she takes even more chances to show the guys she is entitled to play in their league.

This project obviously stirred the 78-year-old Huston's wise old blood. He has never offered his bleak view of human nature with more slyness or style, and in Nicholson, he has an actor whose subtlety and nerve match his. Maybe the script that Writers Condon and Roach quarried out of the former's good popular fiction has too many obligations to a busy plot in the last reels when their satirical blade seems to lose some of its edge. But by then, the spell has been cast, and Prizzi's Honor has established itself as a shrewd and entertaining fable told out of the corner of cynical mouths.